How to Boost Your Email Opt-In Rate by 664% in 24 Hours

20 Mar How to Boost Your Email Opt-In Rate by 664% in 24 Hours

How to Boost Your Email Opt-In Rate by 664% in 24 Hours

How to use lead magnets to increase opt-ins like crazy

Would you like to put your email list on steroids? I bet you would!

I changed the kind of lead magnet I offered

I changed the way I presented and promoted the lead magnet.

If you’re not aware of what a lead magnet is, you’ve probably come across them before. In fact, you may have even entered your email address to receive one: Marketers call the gift offered in return for an email address a lead magnet.

A good lead magnet entices new readers to give you their email address because it gives them something they want.

It’s like fly fishing. You need a tempting lure to reel in a fish.

Here’s how.

How to Create a Lead Magnet Quickly With the 10/5 Principle

Bigger is better, right?

Well, not always, and not when it comes to your lead magnet.

I recently asked a couple of content marketers, “How do you reward your new subscribers?” One of them said proudly, “They get three substantial ebooks!”

That was how I used to think too. At WritetoDone, we used to reward our subscribers with a fat, 70-page ebook.

This was a mistake. It seemed a good idea to offer something of high value, and I mistakenly thought that high value meant big. But it didn’t work.

These days, people don’t have the time to wade through a whole eBook and they definitely won’t take action on it.

So what do they want? Well, your audience wants something that’s…

insanely useful

easy to consume

actionable

When I realized this, I decided to use a new strategy: The 10/5 Principle of Creating a Lead Magnet. What this means is simple:

A lead magnet should take less than 10 minutes to consume and no more than 5 hours to create.

I’ll show you EXACTLY how to create an irresistible lead magnet in a moment, but first, let’s talk about conversion. After all, your lead magnet needs to convert readers to subscribers. Otherwise even that relatively low time commitment of five hours is for nought.

Conversion means that you benefit from traffic. Because even if you had a huge stream of traffic passing through your website and visitors didn’t take any action (like subscribing or purchasing a product), your traffic would be of little value.

But if you get your visitors to take action, you’re on the way to converting them into loyal readers and customers.

That’s what conversion is all about.

How to Create a Lead Magnet That Converts Like Crazy

To convert, your lead magnet must be something your readers need.

Let me give you an example…

A short while ago, Carl, a friend of mine, bought a puppy from a pet shop.

She was adorable!

The next day, after work, Carl couldn’t wait to get back to his puppy.

As he opened the door to his apartment, a nasty smell hit him.

The puppy pooped on the carpet in his bedroom, as well as leaving a little ‘present’ on the kitchen floor.

After he’d cleaned up the mess, Carl went online to find out how to house-train his puppy. As you can imagine, he needed that information urgently.

A short while later he rang me: “Hey Mary, I’ve found a free report on the Net called 10 Tips on How to House-train Your Puppy. What a relief!”

This report was a lead magnet. Do you think Carl was happy to trade his email address for it?

You bet!

The owners of the business found a problem that their target audience was struggling with (in this case, house-training their pets), and solved it through the lead magnet.

And Carl needed an immediate solution to his problem. It was a matter of urgency.

Urgency is driven by fear, discomfort or passion, and it’s heightened by problems which demand an immediate solution.

There are three levels of urgency. And you need to distinguish between them in order to create a compelling lead magnet.

How to Distinguish the 3 Levels of Urgency

The three levels of urgency are Interest, Strong Desire, and Urgent Need. Check out the examples below, based on the story of Carl’s puppy.

Can you see how each of these topics have a certain level of urgency?

So how does this apply to you? How can you choose an idea for a lead magnet?

When you consider a topic for a lead magnet, it’s important to consider which level of urgency it targets.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to assess the level of urgency with just five minutes of research.

All you need to do is to look on Amazon, check out the Dummies range, and do a Google search with your topic to see if Google ads pop up.

After all, if the chosen topic for your lead magnet is something people really need, it should show up in a range of published books and also in ads.

Let’s take a closer look at how to do this, using the keyword phrase, housetrain puppy.Our first visit is to Amazon.

In just the first few pages, you can find 9 different books on how to housetrain a puppy. All in all there are more than 669 books that come up under this keyword.

Now let’s take a look at the For Dummies range.

As you can see the same keyword brings up four For Dummies books.

As the third part of our search, let’s look at whether there are ads for this keyword on Google.

As you can see above, a Google search brings up three ads for a closely related keyword.

Each level of urgency shows up clearly when you look at product numbers and ad placements.

Below is a simple guideline that will tell you whether the chosen topic for your lead magnet has a high level of urgency or not.